


Here is the Church

by Chainofprospit



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (more accurately Bisexual Panic), Gay Panic, Hand & Finger Kink, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:06:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4519548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chainofprospit/pseuds/Chainofprospit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan Niall Lynch had a hand kink, and it was all Adam Parrish’s fault. </p><p>(Exactly what it sounds like.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I have no idea where I'm going with this. Certainly nowhere with a plot. Not sure it'll be PWP either. Possibly slow-burn fluff porn? 
> 
> Who knows. Anyway, there'll be more.

Ronan Niall Lynch had a hand kink.

This was not strictly true. More accurately, Ronan Lynch had a kink. And that kink was for a body part. A specific body part. Which specific body part changed depending on the person. He would never be sure why it worked that way, but somehow each transfixion was held in one part of their bodies, and whether he wanted to or not, whether he wanted _them_ or not, and regardless of how badly or shamefully or regretfully, that was the part he dreamed about.

For Gansey, it had been (still was?) his throat. Ronan could never stop watching the way he swallowed, the way his neck glided like a golden pillar from his Atlantic shoulders to his Hellenic jaw, as though the head upon him were a trophy. Because Gansey never huddled, his neck was always the purest and most elegant support of his confidently lifted chin. It was kind of annoying that Ronan was notably taller than him, actually. It was only by lounging that he could gaze up to his jaw from the underside, following the sloping sinew over his esophagus, tracing on either side with his eyes the divot he knew thrummed with an ichorous pulse.

For Kavinsky – though Ronan bit this down and liked to pretend that this part of him didn’t exist – it was shoulders. Whether he despised or was thrilled by the sight of them, it was always that curve of the shoulders that defined Kavinsky to him. Like the curve of a road slicing through jacked mountains, like the hunch of a panther, like a pauldron, it was the most outward part of Kavinsky; a knob of bone like a moulded gearshift, one whose connections to the whirling engine you could trace beneath translucent skin, all collarbones and scapulas. Ronan would never be able to forget that gruesome way his shoulders had been thrown back, scraped wide, to accept death – like a vulture casting open its ugly wings.

For Adam Parrish, Ronan’s kink was hands.

In all accuracy, Adam Parrish’s hands were not really the most Adam part of him. Adam, really, to any unbiased viewer, was: freckled elbows and knobbed wrists; Adam was: wide-set eyes and thin mouth; Adam was: that gently sloping spine; Adam was: subtle, slim boxed hips and long legs like trees, the color of cat-tails.

But for all intents and purposes, to Ronan Lynch, the end-all be-all of Adam Parrish was and would forever be his hands.

Hence, kink.

To be perfectly fair to Ronan Lynch, it must be acknowledged: Adam Parrish’s hands were the doers of some extraordinary things. They were the spreaders of Tarot cards, the lighters of scrying candles, the jerkers of wrenches, the wipers of axle grease, the writers of best-mark essay assignments. Adam Parrish’s hands were the pagers of books, the smoothers of brows, the clippers of hair, the clutchers of small change. Adam Parrish’s hands were the movers of rocks, the repairers of energy, the wielders of magic. They were Cabeswater; they were sorcerers; they were every way Adam built his own damn road of bricks to climb out of the hellpit from whence he came.

That was not why Ronan liked them.

Or maybe it was. He didn’t know why he liked them. But Ronan was the haver of a kink, and he did know exactly the manifestations of what that meant (not least due to the frequency of his fixations to haunt his dreams). Which is to say, that without any particular reason for his attachment to or admiration of said hands, Ronan knew what he liked about them:

He liked their fingers. He liked that they were long and brown, that all their edges were rounded off but that the tips ended in soft squares. None of that tapering bullshit for Adam’s hands; no, these were not candlesticks or fashionable women’s jeans. They were machinations of wood, the fine-fingered ends of branches, knuckles like swollen knots, stymying and natural.

He liked that the dips where Adam’s fingers met his knuckles were shaped like ‘U’s instead of ‘V’s; very long Us, slim slim gaps the perfect size for pencils or rubber bands or charcoal sticks. He liked imagining his own fingers, which were like rope or bones or knotted metal, slipping in between them.

He liked the way the knuckles could have been veins themselves, or violin strings, tenuous and strong, highway dividers, ridges. He liked how Adam traced his own thumb over them sometimes, unconsciously, when he was thinking. He liked that Adam felt things to think, liked watching his thumbpad drag over the gentle mountains.

He liked how flat Adam’s palms were. How square. How they stopped flat at the bottom as if to say: Look. Stop. That’s all. The hands could have been their own entities. No gentle sloping here; his palms were arid and quiet, a map of barely ridged lifelines and the soft almost-plushness of his lower thumb muscle where it met them.

He liked the thumbs themselves, actually; unnecessarily long, like Adam Parrish tended to be. (Not quite tall in the way Ronan was tall; where Ronan was a snow leopard on its hind legs, all haunches and lithe prowl and general largeness, Adam was an ent or a long-legged stag, an elegant young colt, all legs and knees and thin and long and strange.) Adam’s thumbs stuck out like… well, like sore thumbs, flexible and smooth and careful, with rectangular pads and carefully clipped nails. They bent all the way back in a perfect hitch-hiker’s thumb; Ronan Lynch wanted to be the one to collect him into the passenger’s seat.

He liked the bones and sinews that made up Adam’s most sensuous (in his opinion) instruments, liked the surety of them, liked that they were molded hard and smooth on the underside with the subtle callouses of a laborer, but still slender and artful and delicate as a scholar’s; they were flexible and certain and wide-spreading like a magician’s, with the raised veins and straight creases of someone who often clenched their fists - while still gleaming the virgin knuckles of someone who had never punched another human being.

(Ronan was not sure if Adam was, himself, a human being. It seemed possible that he was some sort of reenvisioned myth, a cryptid of Henrietta, Virginia with Very Beautiful Hands.)

In summary, Ronan Niall Lynch had a hand kink, and it was all Adam Parrish’s fault.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ichorous refers to 'ichor' being the blood of the gods. Pauldron is a piece of shoulder armor. Ronan's attraction to Kavinsky does not indicate Rovinsky being or having been canon at any point in the canon of this fic. Kavinsky is a super interesting character and also should not be with Ronan, despite how much he wants to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam Parrish "doesn't" have a crush like Ronan Lynch "doesn't" have a hand kink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I think I figured out a vague idea about where I'm going with this fic now. Congrats, me! 
> 
> This chapter includes talk specifically about orientations. You can expect Adam to continue to have difficulty addressing his orientation in the upcoming chapters. I want to emphasize that all of the discussion is through the lens of the characters. Not all of them know jack shit about romantic vs sexual orientations, broadness of gender identity, et cetera, and it's not going to come easily or naturally for them. Adam's bisexuality panic is going to be as realistic as I can make it in the sense that he's a teenager afraid of being gay. I don't think same-gender attraction is at all a fearsome thought, and neither does Adam, when it comes down to it, but he is going to struggle with unlearning his associations before he gets there. Consider this forewarning for anyone who might have difficulty reading through the thoughts of someone not-yet-accepting of their orientation.

Adam Parrish did not have a crush.

He was not strictly certain what he _did_ have, if anything. A curiosity? An interest? A… nothing, nothing at all, completely ordinary reaction to the weird keenness of knowing Ronan Lynch had a crush on him. It niggled at the back of his brain uncertainly sometimes, natural tendencies towards hesitance, self-doubt, but Adam Parrish was the only one who defined Adam Parrish, and he said it was just that.

He was still bitter about the amount of time he spent fixating on ‘it’ even being a thing worth noticing about himself.

It had started becoming more noticeable after a conversation with Blue. They had been sitting on her bed one night after a movie (it had begun sharply supervised by Maura, but that soon became a moot effort when she and Mr Gray had retreated to her mother’s room for their own “movie”), Blue swinging her legs idly over the side of the mattress, Adam just trying to find room for his own long legs to fit.

They had tittered away a little, mostly about nothing, and then out of nowhere Blue had asked:

“Is Ronan gay?”

Adam’s pulse had jumped. The first question that leapt to mind was: Why ask _me_? He’d shoved it down – it was true, after all, that he and Ronan had been spending a lot of time together, and that Gansey had a tendency towards being oblivious, and that Noah, well. You just didn’t really ever know if you could find Noah or not. Instead, carefully, preserving his composure despite thumping heartbeat, he’d said:

“Why do you ask?”

Blue had bit her lip and swung herself up to a sitting position, bed squeaking quietly. “It’s not that it _means_ anything, one way or another,” she’d said. “It’s just – I always thought he was, assumed, except then I realized he’s never actually said so. No one has. I don’t know if it’s just a _thing_ , or if his orientation is ambiguous, or what. He’s never shown any interest in girls, which is fine, obviously, frankly I rather shudder to think how he might decide to court one – blasting the Murder Squash song underneath their window at all hours, maybe.” She gave an exaggerated grotesque shudder, and Adam’s lip had twitched in amusement, though his nerves were still wrung tight.

“How horrifying,” he’d murmured in agreement, casting his eyes up in her direction as a signal to continue.

Seemingly pleased at the lack of negative reaction, Blue had gone on. “Anyway, I’ve seen the way he looks at –” (her eyes flickered towards Adam for an invisible half-second) “– some people sometimes, and I feel like it would sort of be an important thing to _know_ about him, but I’m afraid to ask. I thought you might know.”

Him. _Seen the way he looks at_ him - _Adam_. There’d been an unsteady stumble in his ventricles, one which he forcibly quieted, taking this in and thinking for a moment before giving Blue his answer.

“I mean… I don’t think it’s really for me to say, exactly, as far as identity goes,” he’d said slowly. “No one really… brings it up. I think Gansey wants to make sure he never feels unsafe about it. But as far as I know, everyone just kind of… assumes, I guess. It’s not like he’s the dating type, anyway, so it doesn’t really come up.”

Blue had nodded, giving a soft, thoughtful “Hm” at his last comment. Adam, at the time, felt like prying, interrogating her: what was so questionable about that? Did she think Ronan would actually be the sort to date people? He had never even considered it of him before.

But Blue interrupted his thoughts with a sigh. “Honestly, it’s getting to the point where Orla is the person in Henrietta I’m sure is straight.”

“And me,” Adam had reminded, then cursed himself for the excessive immediacy with which he’d jumped to answer. He was just making himself sound like he had something to prove.

Blue’d looked at him, eyes blinked a fraction wider than normal, as though something about this answer surprised her. “Oh. Right, well, yeah, that too.”

Adam had avoided her gaze, twisting his torso around to examine Blue’s canvas trees. Something else had bothered him, and it finally cleared in his brain. He could forgive the exclusion of Gansey and Noah, because she had said “sure,” and there was no reason she’d be certain of them. Gansey was very pastel-inclined, for instance. But… “Your mom, though?” he pressed.

“Oh,” said Blue. “No, she’s bisexual. Pansexual? Something. She and Calla dated in college.”

Which ruled out Calla, then, too. Huh. Stuff he hadn’t known – hadn’t even considered. Why should he? Orientation wasn’t really a pressing issue on his day-to-day agenda, and straight-until-proven-gay had always worked perfectly fine for him in life. He had begun to wonder if that was perhaps a narrower view than would accurately accord to reality. He didn’t have to think of Maura or Calla any differently now, right? It wasn’t like he had to really rearrange his understanding of them in order to include this new information. Maybe?

He wished any of this came easily.

“I suppose Mr Gray might be straight,” she went on, seeming now to just be musing to herself. “Maybe I’ll ask him. Maybe he had a streak of like seventeen Abercrombie model boyfriends in college. Who knows?”

“Who knows,” echoed Adam, watching her. Had she thought of Adam that way, too? Unknown until proven straight? The way she’d seemed surprised. Did he seem not-straight? He’d remembered, against his will, the way his dad had always called the other Aglionby boys “sissy bitches” for their good hair and the way they dressed. He wasn’t sure what to do with this recollection, except treat it as a reminder to hate his father.

Blue puffed out a breath of air, tilting her head at Adam, then smiled. He would always be weak for her smile, even now that he was no longer bitter about her rejection, her disinterest in him. “Sorry for the random topic,” she said. “It had just been frustrating me that I didn’t know whether my impression was right, or made-up. I’m glad I can stop thinking about it now.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Adam. “Me too.”

But Adam hadn’t stopped thinking about it.

He hadn’t stopped thinking about Ronan, either. He was almost positive that Ronan was gay, and equally sure that Ronan was interested in him. But regardless of one being newer than the other, it wasn’t like either was a big deal. The fact that the target of Ronan’s interest was _him_ would always be a source of pride and flattery, but it didn’t change anything. Except that, more and more, he found that he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Couldn’t stop thinking about why Ronan liked him, what Ronan wanted, what was his interest in him, what would happen if he _were_ ––? If Ronan was imagining something he wished he could have between them, what was it? And why was Adam torturing himself wanting to know?

He hated the uncertainty of the growing obsession, but he also hated himself for participating in it. It was cruel, right? To be spending so much time thinking about something that wouldn’t be. Was it sick of him to analyze Ronan like that, to let his mind wander to all the things he could potentially give him, if he were the same way?

He even found himself avoiding Noah because of it, out of concern the other might somehow glean his fixation with that weird supernatural tendency of his. Which was ridiculous, because there wasn’t anything strictly _wrong_ or _incriminating_ about it. Adam was thinking about Ronan, yes, a lot, yes, but because Adam was straight, that didn’t imply the same things it might have if the subject of said reflections had been, say, Blue. Or Orla. Or Helen, or any other girl he might have an interest in.

But because it wasn’t, and it was Ronan, it couldn’t be read as having a crush.

Because Adam Parrish didn’t have a crush, and whatever he did have was only Ronan’s fault.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha ha ha ha you thought this was all gonna be hand kink didn't you. 
> 
> ... me too, actually. AND YET.


	3. Chapter 3

Ronan Lynch had a problem, and it was called class with Adam Parrish.

Class with Adam Parrish had not been a problem before. Point of fact, Ronan wasn’t entirely sure when it had become a problem.

It had been, he recalled, difficult once previously, shortly after Gansey had first properly noticed the boy, and subsequently taken him under his ever-benevolent wing. Ronan had not been pleased with the adjustment, less than happy to find Gansey’s attention suddenly halved, and he’d even less liked competing for said attention with a boy who was, for all intents and purposes, The Smart One. Cleverness booted out snark and wit, so the previous dynamic had been irreparably shifted from Ronan-and-Gansey’s iron-and-gold to the tasteless trifecta of the Brain, the Brawn, and the Beauty.

Ronan didn’t like to share.

That, however, he had ultimately gotten over, mostly due to the discoveries that A) Adam and Gansey fought, a lot; and B) unlike Gansey, Adam did not have the energy to try particularly hard to be incorruptible. That meant Ronan could make trouble, and that meant fun, and that meant eventually (begrudgingly) accepting Adam as a tolerable addition to the group. So the problem had become less of a Problem and more of a Dynamic, which was Ronan’s polite speak for what Gansey liked to call ‘Stop antagonizing Parrish, you’re distracting him.’

That was months ago, now, and had been replaced by an entirely different sort of problem.

Ronan suspected this would be less simple to get over.

The worst bit about this problem was that it was suddenly and entirely unexpectedly two-fold. He was absolutely positive, for example, that over Spring Term, it had not been so fucking weirdly thrilling whenever Adam agreeably two-teamed teachers with him, the two of them their own devilish team of bait-and-hook. It had definitely not been as fascinating to watch Adam get every answer right and occasionally, quietly correct the textbook like it was no big deal. (Ronan would have pointedly set the thing on fire and declared education a farce, himself.)

This might not have been so troubling by itself, but now the above was definitely, definitely a thing, and so was, as was perhaps inevitable, his hand kink. So Ronan had to deal with the attack on his psyche from two flanks: the hopeless attraction to Adam’s knife-sharp intellect, and the addictive besottment with Adam’s stupidly gorgeous fingers.

It was, needless to say, distracting, particularly because the aforementioned fingers were currently twitching, folded neatly behind Parrish’s back in military form, directly in front of Ronan’s face. Adam was standing, straight-backed, reciting their substitute Latin teacher’s current exercise, which was, oh-so-originally, Virgil:

 

> “... _Litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto_
> 
> _Vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram_
> 
> _Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem_
> 
> _Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris_
> 
> _Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit_...”

The words were faraway. Ronan wasn’t paying attention. How could he? Words didn’t mean anything until he was watching the hard press of Adam’s flyaway scrawl. Fingers tracing Latin letters carefully. Fingers tracing skin. Fingers feeling the hum of his throat while reciting. Mouth on fingers? The taste – oil, salt, drywall from his crumbling apartment above St. Agnes, the dry powder of laundry detergent.

Gansey’s curious stare prickled his neck and Ronan realized he was glowering. He forced his own fingers to uncurl from their deathly grip on his mechanical pencil and ignored the other, deliberately looking straight ahead. Adam’s fingernails were always neatly trimmed, despite his tendency towards anxious fidgeting. And clean; they were always clean. He personally knew Adam spent excessive time meticulously scrubbing out the dirt and engine grease from his hands, determined to refuse any hint of hands that worked for a living. As though he could; the callouses spoke for themselves. As far as Ronan was concerned, he might as well keep the engine grease. He thought it was sexy.

He quickly checked himself to see if he was glaring again, mentally smoothing his brow. It turned out to be just in time, because the professor – a woman, this time, olive-skinned and crisply kept – was addressing him. It was his turn to recite.

He uncoiled himself from his chair, a lazy lion lifting lankily to standing, and rolled his head, cracking his neck.

 

> “ _Litora,_ ” he echoed, “ _multum ille et terris iactatus et alto_
> 
> _Vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram_ …”

And on class went.

Painfully, though, Latin wasn’t the only class Ronan had with Adam.

The previous semester it had been Economics; this time, Advanced Physics. Ronan was taking it because he got to mess with shit. Adam was taking it because it looked good on his transcripts. Neither of them had any interest in physics, which, torturously, meant that every moment spent ignoring lectures was inevitably redirected yet again to obsessing over Adam Parrish’s hands. Latin was difficult, but survivable enough if only because Ronan could actually tear his eyes away when it came time to participate. Latin was important. He gave at least half a shit about Latin.

But here… Here, in the lab, everything was ten times worse. Instead of Adam’s clasped hands during recitation, it was Adam running his fingers over his sleeve cuffs a dozen times each. Instead of a half-obscured view of Adam’s loose left-hand pencil grip, it was window-lit fingertips rubbing over the staple of their lab packet, or fine knuckles knocking idly against random physics instruments.

The worst part was watching him fill in graphs when they needed to plot slopes or equations or whatever excessively elaborate math problems apparently taught them something about movement. Adam’s pencil lines weren’t the most smooth naturally, so he would run over them stroke by stroke until the shape was just right, a stubborn perfectionist, wearing down his wooden pencil lead and filling in hyperbolas with even, dull, thickly lain lines of graphite until it was perfectly smooth.

He was always so careful not to get the lead to smudge his hand, and Ronan hated it. Everything that came from Adam was crooked and charcoal and Ronan wanted unbearably to be painted with it. Wanted to be smeared with engine oil and harshly outlined in furnace fuel and traced in ash and soot and soil by Adam’s fingers until he was wearing the inside of his head on his skin. Adam would be russet dappled tree-bark brown, waxy and wicked like a swan’s feathers, and Ronan obsidian smoke and shadow. Adam would be a good painter, actually, Ronan thought; Adam would be good at anything, piano, harp, pressing bare palms into a palette –

“Dude, you’re gonna have no nails left at all if you keep doing that,” murmured Adam’s low voice, just enough Henrietta seeping through that it was apparent the comment was just for Ronan.

Ronan looked at him with a challengingly set brow. “What are you talking about?”

Adam rolled a shoulder and his chin to gesture towards Ronan’s own hands; leaning on the elevated counter, he’d been tearing apart his own nails strip by strip; the cuticles were ragged and at least the first two nail beds on his right hand showed sliver-thin lines of red blood from being torn too low. Ronan curled his fingers into his palms, making deliberately loose fists, careful to hold them so that they hid most of the fingernail crescents shed on the counter.

“Fingernails are for prisses,” he said.

“Whatever you say,” commented Adam, bemused, and turned away.

Ronan’s hands weren’t beautiful like Adam’s, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t there to look pretty for Adam Parrish; that was not how the elegant boy thought of him. (He deliberately didn’t define exactly what that “how” was on his end, in his head – that wasn’t something he was eager to think about in words.)

Except – sometimes, just sometimes, lately, it seemed as though Adam’s expression was unusually introspective when he looked at Ronan. Sometimes, just sometimes, when he blinked and broke gaze it seemed as though he had caught himself holding Ronan’s eyes for longer than he’d expected. Sometimes he thought he felt his gaze on him.

But just sometimes.

It wasn’t relevant, either way. Because that wasn’t the way this worked. This worked one way, and the way was this:

For once, Ronan had a problem with his classes that wasn’t disinterest, and this time, the fault was entirely that of Adam Parrish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you caught the reference, you can thank tumblr user liniochtai, who suggested the idea while I was writing. 
> 
> Anyway, I have no idea how this reads or anything. Ronan's weird to write from the POV of because he's so in his thoughts that time and scene seem to mean nothing to him. Hopefully it's not too shit. 
> 
> Oh, and I'm in school now, so slower writing schedule. The goal is to update every week-ish. 
> 
> (PS: I might talk more about Ronan's picking; he picks at scabs, bumps, nails, cuticles, whatever. That's called dermatillomania, and if you have problems with the same thing, you might want to look it up. I can offer resources if you want.)


End file.
